Eco-Justice Prophet Honored in Dixwell

The best computer models are still seriously underestimating the climate crisis; political leaders are at sea, panicking — and don’t want you to know it — to find new ways to handle the unprecedented waves of refugees worldwide fleeing drought, famine, and violence; and leading business moguls like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos want to solve Earth’s problems through space travel, and the working class and poor are not being offered steerage on the rocket.

Saturday afternoon those challenging ideas and an appealing contrarian vision of a cooperative, non-capitalist world that promotes a kind of ​“eco-socialism” jazzed up a crowd of 35 activists, labor organizers, conservation land trust advocates, Green Party folks, and local progressive officials at the Dixwell Q House.

The sober yet upbeat ceremonial occasion was the awarding of the 2023 Promoting Enduring Peace (PEP) Gandhi Peace Award to Kali Akuno, a Black communal empowerment activist and social justice theorist and founder of Cooperation Jackson.

Established in 2014, Cooperation Jackson is a network of worker cooperatives in Jackson, Miss., developing a network of independent but connected work cooperatives, raising capital to buy land, creating education/training centers, and other democratic institutions. 

A former economic development official in Jackson’s city government, Akuno is not only the group’s founder but a growing national figure as an economic/social justice theorist and inspirational speaker around the country 

Originating in the post-WWII era of fears of nuclear annihilation, the award has been presented annually by the Connecticut-based Promoting Enduring Peace group to people ranging from Eleanor Roosevelt, Robert J. Lifton, Martin Luther King, Daniel Ellsberg, and Bill McKibben.

In a wide-ranging and quietly eloquent address, Akuno brought that past history back to the future on Saturday.

“A quarter of the planet’s people have no functioning government,” he said. ​“Look at [nuclear-armed] Pakistan falling apart, and … Russia too could be on the road to becoming a failed state. What’s going to happen to the nukes? That’s the origin of the award, born in nuclear fears. And there is also a push [in some quarters now] for war with China.

“So how do people like us, who have a different world view, [proceed]? I don’t want to leave you with a sense of doom. We need to organize and now there are great opportunities.”

After formal greetings-to-Akuno from long-time local activist Barbara Fair referencing her successful work advocating for more humane treatment of prisoners, especially those in solitary; and from New Haven Federation of Teachers President Leslie Blatteau (“Count me in to help organize an eco-social future … and promoting enduring peace by fully funding public education”), Akuno rose to speak.

Yet his remarks — affable, soft-spoken without jargon, and with the gift of seeming as if he were expressing himself individually to people before him — didn’t specifically address his local work in organizing. 

He didn’t speak much about the grassroots struggle of a decade to fight the dis-empowering of majority Black Jackson, Miss. by a now right-wing majority state legislature; or how cooperative businesses are equipping workers and residents of Jackson, particularly to address, near term, a water crisis, occasioned by decades of infrastructure neglect, and, then the longer term the needs of poor, unemployed, Black and Latino residents through, in part, the acquisition and conservation of the land.

Instead Akuno’s remarks that most riveted his audience dealt with what he called the ​“shift in consciousness” that is necessary to power organized, profound change. Here are a few excerpts:

Lesson of the pandemic: ​“We’ve been told the world economy is just too complex, too great to control [to effect immediate and necessary change to avoid disasters]. However, the lie given to this was in the pandemic. The U.S. and governments around the world gave away millions to keep the world economy alive. We saw it in real time. So profound change [achieved quickly] is possible.”

Consciousness shift: ​“So we are not demanding what we need to do, because that requires a shift in consciousness. In our minds the end of the world is ​‘realer’ than changing the capitalist system. So we have to go to war against that in your own mind. We have to look at reality as it is and organize around it.”

Keys to organizing: ​“One of the current weaknesses of progressive organizations is that we need to talk to each other more. The violence happening in the streets is because people don’t have their basic needs being met. A community with the most peace is one that is most resourced. The core idea is how do we work beyond our [individual and organizational] difference to meet [common] needs. If we get to this level of dialogue [and networking within and beyond the local], then we’ll be able to withstand some of the onslaught coming our way.”

Lessons From L.A.

After his formal remarks, this reporter asked Akuno what triggered his faith that, as he had phrased it, profound and meaningful change can happen quickly, and also what keeps him going.

Akuno grew up poor in Los Angeles, he said, in Watts, and the streets were full of young people, including some of Akuno’s family members involved in low-level drug trade. Then, on the occasion of the Olympics coming to the city in 1984, when Akuno was only 12, he was savvy enough to notice how efficiently the L.A.P.D. and the sheriffs ​“cleaned up the street of drugs,” he recalled.

“They all let me see how you could stop this shit any time [if you wanted to]. They arrested everyone. And [for that three-month period of time] a ten-dollar bag of weed [was so rare], if you could find one, it cost $100. They cleaned it up; they arrested everyone. They controlled the drug trade, they created special zones. I learned the state is allowing this to happen. And then you ask why?”

He knows on one level that what he is doing in Jackson, and beyond, he said, will be there, more likely for his two children and maybe his grandchildren to reap the most benefits. Still, he said. He is a student of history (and its revolutions) and it gives him hope. 

And then there was the inspiration of his grandmother, he recalled, who lost six kids during the Dust Bowl era of the Great Depression.

“One day she was chewing out my dad, this was in the 1970s,” and Akuno’s father, who eventually succumbed to drugs, was complaining about how hard things were, ​“and she said, ​‘Y’all don’t know what tough times are. It’s bad but it’s been worse.’ And my having kids now, that also gives what I am doing a new level of depth.”

Akuno is also a collector of old books. After soliciting a referral, he said he was going to try to get over to Grey Matter while he was still in town perhaps to buy some.

Beaver Hills Alder Tom Ficklin presented Akuno with an official proclamation of appreciation from the Board of Alders and Ficklin, in brief personal remarks, said he was personally committed to see ​“that your vision can unfold in New Haven.”

Among the local groups co-sponsoring the event, according to the program, were Unidad Latina en Accion, Kiyama Movement, Stop Solitary CT, the CT Climate Crisis Mobilization, and Connecticut Democratic Socialists of America.